Comment by bluescrn
12 days ago
Be thankful that consumer/hobbyist drones haven't been banned entirely already (banning other model aircraft along with them as collateral damage).
Especially after all the footage of essentially-hobby-grade drones with familiar open-source flight controller software being turned into very effective weapons of war in Ukraine.
Would turning drones into arms not make them more, rather than less, protected in the US?
I like the way you think.
Explosive drones would be a destructive device. I don't know about drone mounted firearms though.
No
"Shall not be infringed!"
Or 3D printers! You can print scary "ghost guns" with them. And they're mostly made in China. Although maybe Stratasys will push for that next now that they're lost their stranglehold on the market.
While the cheaper 3D printers are mostly chinese, Prusa is still a non-chinese option :)
While this is true and I own a Prusa MK4, they're so behind it's not even funny.
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We'll what happens after the first public vigilante action against a corrupt cop who got a paid vacation instead of a jail sentence.
But I think that the cat is out of the bag and that DRM will be the attempted solution to this kind stuff. It's going to go poorly though.
What part can you regulate and control? Not the batteries or the motors, or the off the shelf microcontrollers.
They could put anybody who assembles those parts into a drone into prison. Of course it would still be technically feasible to make one anyway, just as it's technically feasible to make an autosear, or for that matter a whole gun. Doesn't mean it can't be banned.
If they weren't able to stop people from growing and distributing marijuana then I doubt they'll be able to stop this.
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The bans are inevitable. It's only a matter of time before somebody tries to drop a pipe bomb on a politician.
I hope not, i'm pretty involved in the high power rocketry hobby and the materials/electronics and knowledge exist in the hobby to make something like a guided surface-to-surface rocket with a range in 10s of miles but no one does because it would instantly ruin the hobby for everyone. A friend of mine in heavy into r/c planes and is an embedded engineer so he has a bunch of autopilot stuff going on. I'm sure he can scale as high as he wants (he's also a private pilot) and fly a heavy payload to a point on a map autonomously. Again, no one does it because it would ruin the hobby for everyone.
Lots of people want to do this but the place for it is like a DARPA challenge not in the general hobby. If the authorities got wind of it then down come the regulations and no more hobby.
Yes, as a long-time fixed-wing RC hobbyist, it's generally the newbie idiots who do stupid things that threaten the entire hobby. Despite all the new rules (which I don't even bother to keep up with anymore), I still fly my planes like I always have. And just like always, I don't bother anyone and no one bothers me.
The problem for drones is easily weaponizable models exist off the shelf for people with malicious intentions and no interest in preserving the hobby. To weaponized a rocket requires more intellectual investment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Caracas_drone_attack
They wouldn't want to use a firearm for that. Might get guns banned...
Hey at least if the drones are turned into weapons there's a chance the Supreme Court might overturn the bans.
Just need to attach a trigger to the drone and then it can kill as many people as it wants without being regulated.
Everyone knew that they would be easy to convert into very effective weapons since the very start, no?
grenades are sold separately though.
"Batteries not included" just won't have the same ring again.